Does this sound familiar?
You’re operating a thriving small business that’s slowly but surely growing. You’ve had the same team of dedicated employees for years now, but it’s time to expand and bring on additional team members.
You have a great employee value proposition (EVP) and the means to hire more people, but you don’t have a dedicated recruiting team by your side. Between messy spreadsheets, expensive job ads, and managing third-party recruiters, you feel as though you’re settling for candidates that don’t meet the needs of your new roles as you work on your small business recruitment.
And, because hiring comes in waves, everyone on your team is pitching in with no clear direction or strategy as to why or how you hire. Free ATS tools just aren’t cutting it, and you have no way of managing the talent that enters your hiring pipeline.
As a growing business, hiring without the right talent relationship management (TRM) solution can quickly impede your ability to expand. Not to mention, hiring the right candidates and nurturing relationships with them is a crucial part of ensuring your team is set up for long-term success.
However, choosing the right small business hiring software like a TRM solution can be tricky—which is why we’re breaking down the 5 key reasons you need a TRM solution for your small business recruitment goals.
But first, let’s look at what TRM is.
What is Talent Relationship Management (TRM)?
Talent relationship management (otherwise known as ‘talent management’) refers to the consistent process of attracting and retaining the high-quality employees your company hires—including developing their skills, engaging them in their work, and leveraging existing talent to drive greater internal mobility.
The primary goal of talent relationship management is to build a dedicated, motivated workforce of employees that will stay with your organization for the long haul. To achieve that, more recruiters are starting to leverage a TRM solution or software.
Just like CRM solutions help sales teams develop customer relationships and drive customer retention, TRM solutions help companies build relationships with candidates and retain their interest beyond the hiring cycle.
TRM solutions act as a platform for employers to manage talent relations and continuously connect with candidates. However, they also act as a central repository for candidate information, which makes it easier to source from an existing, nurtured pool of candidates for small business hiring needs—today and into the future.
Why effective talent relationship management matters
In a candidate-driven market (which 90% of recruiters say we’re in), the relationships that you build with top talent will play a crucial role in your ability to recruit and keep that talent as your small business hiring needs grow. The world is changing quickly and one of the biggest shifts is the need for a candidate-centric hiring approach.
Let’s consider a few of the top reasons why more employers are using talent relationship management solutions for small business recruitment:
- Keep up with the competition—hiring, developing, and promoting top talent strengthens your organization and allows you to better tackle changes to your business and industry long term.
- Drive innovation as you grow—whether it’s new technology or changing business needs, employees that can pivot and grow with your business empower your entire team to solve challenges and innovate for your market.
- Build more engaged teams—employees who are given opportunities to grow and develop are more likely to remain with your organization, engaging in their work while driving key results for your business
- Reduce turnover—disengaged employees are costly, especially when new hires churn soon after they’ve been onboarded. Managing talent effectively can help mitigate turnover, especially when you consider that 63% of companies find retaining talent is harder than sourcing talent
- Create a strong employer brand—attracting the right candidates involves building an employer brand that employees trust and get behind, which is why talent management is so crucial; it can help you consistently improve your employer brand when positioning your company in the talent market
5 reasons you need TRM for your small business recruitment
The right TRM solution can help you streamline your recruiting as you grow, building genuine candidate relationships so you can hire the best talent—and get rid of those pesky spreadsheets, too.
Attract and engage top talent for your small business
Unlike larger enterprise companies, small businesses don’t always have the brand recognition or clout to attract top talent. While this isn’t necessarily a ‘bad thing’ for your business recruitment, it can make hiring the right candidates challenging.
Many small business owners will thus turn to third-party recruiting services or costly job ads to draw attention to their open roles. After all, how can you source and engage top talent if they don’t know how or where to find you?
A TRM solution behaves differently—instead of relying on one outlet or source of talent and awareness, it enables you to source and attract candidates using a multi-channel approach. As you leverage the multi-channel benefits of a TRM solution, you’ll build robust candidate pools that you can continuously nurture over time, so you have a whole pipeline of talent to source from as your business grows.
Build more efficient recruitment processes
When we talk with employers about the tools they’re using to manage their small business hiring, a vast majority rely on things like spreadsheets or email to track all of their recruiting efforts.
There are just a few issues with leveraging those makeshift tools:
- They’re entirely manual, which costs you valuable time you could spend on growing your business
- There’s a lack of sourcing ability
- You can’t integrate those tools or apps with other business tools
- The quality of candidates you source plummets
On top of that, you may also spend hours manually reviewing resumes, organizing messy spreadsheets, or managing both job postings and random applicants through unorganized job boards.
With a TRM solution, you can streamline virtually all aspects of your hiring processes. From sourcing talent to engaging candidates, nurturing relationships, tracking communications and applicants, and more. Oh, and you can ditch those pesky spreadsheets, too!
Unify your entire hiring pipeline
As your business grows, you’ll find that hiring becomes increasingly more nuanced, especially as you build out dedicated recruiting teams. To prepare your business for the realities of recruiting as you scale, it’s crucial you unify your hiring pipeline.
Here are a few of the many reasons you’ll want to unify that pipeline:
- Keep your candidate database organized
- Store and organize historical feedback from candidates
- Gather deeper recruiting insights to make data-driven hiring decisions
- Keep up with compliance
For small business recruitment, a TRM solution simplifies the often arduous tasks associated with unifying an entire hiring pipeline. For example, keeping your candidate database organized and managing candidates can take hours if you do it manually—but a TRM solution can automate those menial recruiting tasks.
Create better candidate experiences that drive hiring and retention
Remember when we talked about brand recognition earlier? For small businesses, hiring talent that may not yet be aware of you can make recruitment feel nearly impossible. But here’s the thing—candidate experience can be a huge driver for both your brand recognition and your recruiting.
A positive candidate experience is a seriously powerful thing. Everything from your job postings to your candidate outreach affects how candidates see you as a brand and employer. Fortunately, a TRM solution can help you create better candidate experiences that drive recruitment marketing while ensuring you source the right candidates.
Let’s say, for instance, that you’re looking to hire for a number of different roles. You’ll likely want to nurture the best talent that comes into your hiring pipeline, but how exactly do you engage and nurture them?
A TRM solution enables you to build more genuine relationships with candidates in more ways than one:
- Create personalized and automated outreach nurture campaigns for consistent touchpoints with the candidates you want to hire
- Send automated candidate feedback surveys to gather insights into your small business recruitment process
- Set up custom EEO dashboards to collect data into your diversity recruiting efforts
- Develop detailed candidate profiles you can update based on hiring and pipeline status
Keep in mind that consistent communication is key when driving candidate experiences that are both positive and memorable.
Scale your small business recruitment efforts as you grow
Undoubtedly one of your greatest challenges when recruiting for your small business is scaling those efforts. How do you balance the need for top talent with the need for quick, efficient hiring as you grow?
It’s not enough to simply post a job ad or keep track of applicants in a spreadsheet. Especially in today’s competitive talent market, finding and hiring the best candidates as you scale is no easy feat.
Unlike those spreadsheets or free ATS tools, a TRM solution is scalable, meaning it can grow and accommodate your small business hiring needs as you grow, too. So, whether you’re growing from 10 to 100 and beyond, having the right solution to manage relationships with top talent will become a must-have.
Consider this:
- A TRM solution acts as a single source of truth, allowing you to more effectively manage talent as you grow (rather than do everything manually)
- You’ll have a more streamlined way of building, managing, and nurturing diverse talent pools you can hire from (no more sourcing applicants through single channels or third-party recruiters)
- Recruiting data and analytics will give you richer insights into what’s working (and what’s not) in your small business recruitment
- Compliance becomes much more manageable, along with EEO reporting
In other words, you can easily scale your hiring efforts to source and nurture talent at every stage of growth.
Is your small business prepared to handle hiring as you grow?
Every small business needs a recruiting strategy, but sourcing candidates and building genuine relationships with top talent is a whole other matter. As your business grows, so too will your hiring needs, and the right talent relationship management approach is critical. Take our quick talent strategy assessment to learn more about how scalable your current hiring strategy is!
